Women's Building

In 1870, the State Agricultural College admitted its first 10 women and offered them the same physically and academically demanding courses as men. Completed on this site in 1900, the Women's Building was a wood-framed, Lake Superior red sandstone neoclassical structure that housed 120 women, including staff, and included a two-story gymnasium, dining room, cooking and sewing laboratories, a woodworking shop, and music rooms. It supported a women's course of study established in 1896 that retained many classical and scientific elements of the standard curriculum while replacing the agricultural focus with domestic economy courses in domestic arts such as cooking, sewing, and music and domestic sciences including nutrition, sanitation, first aid, and physiology. As the number of women on campus neared that of men and women's courses expanded, the building's unique role declined. After a new women's dormitory opened in 1937, the building was renovated for classrooms, offices, and laboratories and renamed Justin Morrill Hall in honor of the sponsor of the federal act of 1862 that established the nation's land-grant college system. In the years that followed, it housed many academic departments at Michigan State University before structural deterioration made it unsuitable for occupation, rehabilitation was judged prohibitively expensive, and it was razed in 2013.

East Lansing, Michigan · United States